Shortly before this interview with the sister of
Thomas Wolfe, Cash had visited his fiancee, who was then working
in Asheville, and they both made a pilgrimage to Wolfe's grave in
Riverside Cemetery. Cash had at first envied Wolfe his success,
so striking by comparison with his own obscurity, but eventually
came to a just appreciation of Wolfe's stature. Wolfe's early
death seems to have shaken Cash, who was well aware that the two
of them had been born in the same year, 1900, Wolfe on October 3
and Cash on May 2.

--Note
from W.J. Cash: Southern Prophet by Joseph L. Morrison
(This article appeared in the Reader section of Prophet.)

[Site ed. note: According to Mary's
"Recollections", contained in Professor Morrison's
papers contained in the North Carolina Room of Wilson Library at
the University of North Carolina, Cash was so moved at the grave
site of Wolfe that he shed tears. (W.J.
Cash: A Life, by Bruce Clayton, L.S.U.
Press, 1991, p. 154)

For an earlier short elegiac article by
Cash on Wolfe, written a month after Wolfe's death, together with
a poetic passage from Of Time and the River,
see "On
Living Forever" - October 16, 1938. For
a short biographical tour of the life of Wolfe, including writing
excerpts, visit The
Thomas Wolfe Web Site at the University of
North Carolina-Wilmington.

This article was based on an interview
Cash had arranged with Mabel Wolfe Wheaton at the old Selwyn
Hotel in downtown Charlotte. The article appeared as a rare
locally produced feature on the regular editorial page of the
paper.]

Sitting
in the lobbyof the
Selwyn Hotel, Mrs. Ralph Wheaton, of 48 Spruce Street, Asheville,
told me about the death of Thomas Wolfe.

Mrs. Wheaton is Tom Wolfe's sister Mabel, older than
the novelist by ten years. You will remember her if you have read
''Look Homeward, Angel" and "Of Time and the
River." Mabel Wheaton looks remarkably like her brother even
for a sister. There is a certain softening of the lines in these
Wolfe faces, a distribution of the bony structure, a flattening
of round surfaces,which strongly suggests the Indians of the
Southwest or the peasant types of Central Europe--or Brittany or
Provence. I have seen brown-faced women about Arles, where all
the strains of the North and the Mediterranean have met and
merged, who reminded me a great deal of Mrs.Wheaton--of Thomas
Wolfe. Contemplation and force: these are the qualities in those
faces that immediately impress you. The brown eyes look at you
with a penetrating directness, give you the impression of
extraordinary concentration. And there is something else there,
too--a feeling of profound kindness and understanding, an eager
will to like and be liked, the absence of the mean little
hostility and suspicion, the will to impress, with which most of
us encounter strangers.

Look Homeward Angel

There was a time back in October, 1929, when life was
not pleasant in Asheville for the Wolfes, including Mabel
Wheaton."Look Homeward, Angel" had just been published
and the town was buzzing with the outrage of little people who
had not yet learned that they had been projected into something
at least resembling immortality, who retaliated by pointing
scornfully to the things Wolfe had revealed about his own
family--none of which came to anything but the admission that
they were human. But Mabel Wheaton wrote her brother a letter
asserting her absolute faith in his intention, her understanding
of what he was about. He replied by telegram--or he himself was
already troubled by what he knew the inevitable reaction would
be, as he afterward revealed in "The Story of a Novel,"
and besides he was a fellow of impulsive generosity, quick to
respond to any warm gesture with another in kind.

Judge Whole

"No novel," that telegram said in effect,
"should ever be judged by line and detail but only as a
whole. And when you look at it that way, you will see that I have
painted all of you, all the Wolfes and all of Asheville, as a
great people." Looking at Mabel Wheaton, you know what he
meant.

She has had her share of the ups and downs which make
up our passage under the sun. In her girlhood, she was a singer
in vaudeville for awhile. Then she married Ralph Wheaton, whom
Asheville still calls a Yankee though he left Ohio 30 years ago.
Ralph sold cash registers, made a lot of money. They lived in
Grove Park in those days, the Wheatons were the rich kin of the
Wolfes. Then Ralph got caught in the boom spirit which struck
Asheville in the Twenties, and which Tom Wolfe has described in
"Boom Town" and various chapters of "Of Time and
the River"--lost his money. His health gave out about that
time, too, and the cash register company dismissed him. (You can
read the story of the Wheaton's cash register days in a story
"The Company" which Tom Wolfe wrote and Mike Gold
published in the New Masses. ) After that, the Wheatons moved to
Washington, where Mabel ran a rooming house for several years.
Tom Wolfe, home from Guggenheim Fellowship days in Europe, and
writing "Of Time and the River" in a Brooklyn lodging
house, used to come down to Washington to see them when he got
too lonely, which was pretty often. Lately the Wheatons have been
living in Florida. One evening Mrs.Wheaton went out to a
neighborhood movie, an automobile struck her and broke her leg.
She walks on crutches now, her leg in a cast, her foot bare and
swollen. At present they are in Asheville. When Mabel Wheaton is
well they will go back to Washington, where she will run a book
shop.

Talks Like Tom

But if Mabel Wheaton by ordinary looks remarkably like
Tom Wolfe, she almost becomes Tom Wolfe over again when she
talks--she talks a great deal--and especially when she talks of
her brother. The words come with the same torrential rush that
you find in his books, and there is a feeling of image piling
upon image so rapidly that the tongue is unable to keep up with
the brain. The effect is a little incoherent at first, but it all
turns out in the end to have its pattern.

She reaches back into the past to dig up a picture of
TomWolfe as a great
lumbering boy with his sleeves halfway up to his elbows, Tom
Wolfe debating in the graduating exercises at the North State
Fitting School in Asheville, her pride in him as she stood
outside the hall and heard Wolfe charging through the crowd to
her shouting, "my voice won for me!" He had had the
foghorn voice which was his in manhood since he was eleven years
old. Tom Wolfe, handed a check for $10,000 by the man from
Harper's, turning away to stare out the window of the Chelsea
Hotel with tears in his eyes--pouring out his joy in a letter to
her that at last somebody had had faith enough in him to give him
more money than he had ever seen before, for a book he had not
yet written. Oh, he would justify that if it tore the heart out
of him. He would write the finest novel he could write--he'd show
'em. Never in his life was he ever to quite get it through his
head that he had already arrived. Occasionally his pride rose up
and asserted itself, but for the most of the time he remained an
humble and wistful boy.

Tom Wolfe's Death

All that, and a thousand things more, as Mabel Wheaton
tells you about the death of her brother. She was with Tom Wolfe
in his last days.

He had gone out there to Seattle, to the West, to
escape--from what he did not quite know, from all the oppressions
of all living. "You can't go home," he had written her
from New York on the eve of the journey--on that theme had been
writing "The Web and the Rock." And now he had been ill
for weeks in the Providence Hospital at Seattle. His brother,
Fred, who runs the Bluebird Ice Cream Co. in Spartanburg, was out
there. But the ice cream business needed Fred, and Tom needed to
be looked after during his convalescence from pneumonia. So Mabel
Wheaton closed up her rooming house, sent Ralph off to his people
in Florida, and went to Seattle.

Tom Wolfe had fallen off--50 pounds. When she got him
up from the hospital bed and dressed him, she had to fasten up
the slack in his waistband with two safety pins in the back of
his pants. But it made him look better. He was handsome now. He
put his hands in front of his belly. "I can do without that
for good," he grinned. And sickness had done something for
his skin. The Viennese Jewish doctor from Vienna came in and
showed them some X-rays. The pneumonia shadow which had been big
as a hat once was down to the size of a dollar now. Yes, Tom
Wolfe could go. There were some other X-rays, but that was just a
matter of form. It was all right now. Tom Wolfe sat on the edge
of his bed and grinned at his sister. "Everything's going to
be all right now, isn't it, Mabel?" She said, "Of
course, Tom."

To Live In Luxury

But first she must go out and rent the best apartment
in the best hotel in town. She demurred on the score of economy,
but he would not hear. "I've got it now," he said.
"We never have had it, but we're going to have it now."
And then she must buy food according to his loving
specifications. Huge steaks, loin lamb chops, French bread,
Roquefort cheese, he'd tell her how to make a real salad, so much
olive oil, so much vinegar, so much pepper, so much salt.
"We've never had it, but we're going to have it now."

When they helped him into the automobile, he climbed
into the back seat, lay back among his bags. He cocked his hat on
the back of his head. "Well, we're out!" he boomed,
grinning.

But at the apartment he felt weak, had to go to bed.
And then, while Mabel Wheaton was busy with the preparation of
the food he had wanted, there came a telegram--from Dr.Watts of
the Providence Hospital staff, who was away at Bellingham. They
had developed and examined those X-rays. "Abscess or tumor
of the brain."

On the phone she talked to Dr. George W. Swift, the
celebrated Western neurologist. "So Watts has taken to
diagnosing the brain!" he growled and came over.
"Tom," said the doctor, a tall and handsome fellow, who
was himself to die within five months, "I've read your
books. You are a great fellow." Tom said, "I know you,
Doctor. You re a great fellow yourself."

"Tom, would you like for me to examine you?"

"Sure," said Tom, grinning. He knew nothing
of the telegram. "But I'm all right. I want to get out of
here in a few days and go down to Palo Alto." He had some
friends down there, Dr. Russell Lee and his wife, Dorothy.

Swift tested Tom's reflexes. "Um, pretty
good," he said. Then he went over and looked out the window
at the dark waters of Puget Sound.

The End Near

"Tom," he said, fingering his face,
"where is your mother?"

Wolfe slowly froze. "Why--why, she's in
Asheville, North Carolina. But I don't want to go back home yet,
Doctor. I've got to go to Palo Alto."

"Oh, no, you haven't, Tom. You're a very sick
man. And you've got to go back East to the Johns Hopkins and the
finest brain man there is--now, tonight. They come to me from all
over the West to work on their brains, but they don't like me
sometimes."

Tom grinned weakly. "That's when you fail, eh,
Doctor."

So that night the journey began. Tom sat on the edge
of the bed in the drawing room and grinned. "Everything's
going to be all right, isn't it, Mabel."

"Of course," she said, "it's going to
be all right, Tom."

Day and night the train rolled Eastward across the
continent. Whistling through the mighty mountains and over the
great plains, past millions of incurious faces. He had written
much about trains. Their whistling as she climbed up from the
south and east through the hills of old Catawba, and shouted away
westward along the French Broad, of the dream of the power and
the glory which stirred in a boy as he listened, and the dream of
the far splendid places to which they hurried. Of trains sweeping
down through the vast reach of the American land, trains in
France, Germany, Russia, England, Italy. But he heard and knew
little of their passage now. For most of the time the nurse kept
him asleep. Once or twice he awakened, grinned at his sister.
"Everything's going to be all right, isn't it, Mabel?"

"Of course, Tom," she said.

At Chicago, Tom's mother joined them.

In Baltimore, Dr. Walter Dandy shook his head. One
chance in twenty, he reckoned. Mabel Wheaton a little resented
that. She thought he was merely trying to increase the
miraculousness of the cure. Of course, everything was going to be
all right. Tom Wolfe could not die now. He had too many books
still to be written.

"Tom," said Dr. Dandy, "I want to cut a
little hole in the back of your head, a little wee hole like
that. Do you mind?"

Tom grinned. "Of course not, Doctor. Go
ahead."

But a moment after he fell to talking of what a fine
hotel they had got into.

Mabel Knew

But Mabel Wheaton knew that Tom Wolfe would die, the
evening after the operation when she attempted to go into his
room. She had a premonition, had come to reassure herself. The
nurse shooed her firmly away, closed the door. But she had
glimpsed his face. And now she fled down the long corridors of
the Hopkins, through the streets to the rooming house where Fred
and his mother were staying. The mother was out. Fred she found
kneeling.

"Come quick," she panted, "Tom is
dying!"

"Mabel!" said Fred, "you've been
sounding Tom's requiem for two days. Tom's all right. You better
kneel down here with me and pray."

But her vehemence at length infected him with alarm
also, and together they hurried back to the hospital. Tom Wolfe
had been dead five minutes when they arrived.

Mabel took him, still warm, into her arms, kissed him
again and again, turned his head with the self-torture ofgrief to look at the incision made by the
knife. The brother beside himself, implored the doctor to do
something. "Bring him back, for ten minutes, five minutes,
one minute! I want to talk to him!"

"You do not understand," Mabel told him.
"Tom is dead."

So Thomas Wolfe died. Afterward part of him did come
home again. Once more the great train climbed up through the old
hills of Catawba, and passed on westward along the French Broad,
leaving another mound behind in the Asheville cemetery.